Working people confront a choice. Either organize to take power into our own hands by making a socialist revolution, or face a future of calamity — economic crises, with ruinous inflation and mass unemployment, along with social upheavals and devastating imperialist wars. The capitalist system runs by and for bosses driven to maximize profits by seizing resources and markets in ruthless conflicts with their rivals and deepening their exploitation of our labor with utter disregard for the consequences.
The working class and our unions have no common interests with them, their wars abroad, their cops and courts, or their Democratic and Republican parties.
Courageous uprisings by working people for political rights in Sudan, Myanmar and Belarus have been met by deadly government-organized assaults — an indication of what all ruling capitalist classes will do when their backs are against the wall. The brutality they mete out against working people at home, as we see in strikes and lockout battles today, is extended in wars against their rivals abroad.
“Great power competition,” a U.S. government report said Nov. 17, determines its foreign policy and lies behind the bipartisan congressional vote Dec. 7 to raise the rulers’ war budget to $768 billion. Washington’s conflicts today with the rulers of China and Russia for influence, markets and resources are sharpening. Each of these powers, especially Beijing, is following Washington’s lead in expanding its military arsenals, stockpiling nuclear weaponry and developing hypersonic missiles.
Washington claims that acquiring ever more destructive arms enables “America” to deter “aggressors” and ensure peace. There is not one, united “America,” but two distinct social classes — the capitalist exploiters and the working class — with sharply opposed interests. The U.S. imperialists have shown they will use every weapon at their disposal, including leveling Korea with carpet bombing in the 1950s, the use of napalm in Vietnam, and nuclear destruction they unleashed against Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Socialist Workers Party demands Washington unilaterally and unconditionally destroy its nuclear armory and immediately withdraw its forces from the Korean Peninsula, the Mideast and elsewhere.
Only by organizing to break from the two capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans, and take power into our own hands, can workers and farmers defend ourselves from what the rulers will inevitably inflict, and prevent them from turning to fascist forces to try and crush our unions and rising working-class struggles when they feel their rule is threatened.
“All talk to the effect that historical conditions have not yet ‘ripened’ for socialism is the product of ignorance or conscious deception,” Leon Trotsky, a central leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote in a resolution adopted by the SWP in 1938. “Without a socialist revolution, in the next historical period,” he said, “a catastrophe threatens the whole culture of mankind.”
The only class capable of charting a course to prevent this is the working class. With communist leadership, workers have shown we can win all those exploited and oppressed by capital to a mighty movement of millions to take power into our own hands. This is the lesson of the two great revolutions of the 20th century — in Russia in 1917 and Cuba’s socialist revolution in 1959.
Emulating their example requires building our own party, a labor party, led by the most self-sacrificing, disciplined and class-conscious working-class fighters. Join the Socialist Workers Party to build such a party today!